Venus in Transit Across the Sun
Like a lot of people, I was excited about the transit of Venus across the face of the sun. Knowing that the chances of me living to be 157 are pretty slim, I figured that this was my one chance to see it. When I woke up this morning and it was mostly cloudy, I thought, well, you never know what the sky will look like in twelve hours. As it turned out, the clouds got heavier as the day wore on and I had pretty much given up hope of seeing it. When I got home I decided to take some pictures in the yard and while I was doing that, the sun peeked through the clouds for less than two minutes. Since I had my camera in my hand, as well as a tripod, I was able to move out from under the trees and get a few pictures before the clouds covered it again. Of course it was too bright and I was working too fast to really see what I was doing. I just set the camera to an exposure of 1/8000 second at f/32 and this is what I got. It’s not all that sharp and I’m sure we’ll be able to download pictures that are much better but I took this one, so I’m happy. You probably won’t be able to see it until you click on the image to enlarge it. Venus is just to the right of 12:00 just under the upper edge of the sun. It only started its transit a little after 6:00 local time so it hadn’t gotten very far by 6:39, when this picture was taken.